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The Cyber Monday has just gone, and here we are with the second Cyber Attacks Timeline of November (Part I here).

Even if no massive breaches against retailers have been discovered so far (however do not get carried away since they will probably need several weeks to surface!), this month equally shows some remarkable events for Cyber Crime, Hacktivism and Cyber Espionage.

Actually I just really did not know where to begin, since each sector shows at least one noticeable events. However, after scrolling down the list, I believe that the crown of the month is all for the powerful Regin, the brand new cyber weapon discovered by Symantec. If you believed that the complexity of Stuxnet, Flame and Duqu was a closed page, you will have to change your mind.

This event has overshadowed the massive attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment, allegedly traced to North Korea, in the wake of the release of the comedy “The Interview”, which has been deemed discriminatory against the country and inciting to terrorism. This attack, which has more then one similarity with the infamous Dark Seoul, has completely blocked the Sony internal IT network and is making happy many individuals worldwide, since several Gigabytes of unreleased material are being leaked in these hours.

Last but not least the hacktivists are back! Not only the Syrian Electronic Army has exited stealth mode, with an attack to Gigya, an identity management platform, which has affected many illustrious victims worldwide, but also the Anonymous have been the authors of several attacks, just like the good old days, in the wake of the controversial decision of the Ferguson grand jury decision.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our electronic identity is inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011, 2012, 2013 and now 2014 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics, and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).

Apparently October has shown a decrease in the number of Cyber Attacks. At least from a mere numerical perspective. It is not a coincidence that I used the term “Apparently” since if we consider the most important event of the month: the massive leak from Worldwide universities executed by Team GhostShell inside their ProjectWestWind operation, things are well different.

The one carried on by Team Ghost Shell (approximately 120k accounts leaked) is for sure the most important operation of the current month which has also shown the first virtual hacking operation (at least as far as I remember): the massive death of avatars inside World of Warcraft.

Other remarkable events in the first half of October concern the attack to Playspan (possibly millions of users affected), the new waves of DDoS cyber attacks against US banks, and an alleged hijacking to the Irish domains of Google and Yahoo!.

It worth to mention also the breach of University of Georgia (8,500 users affected) and the 400,000 bucks stolen by unknown hackers to the City of Burlington.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).

October has come and here it is, also for this month, the first part of my Cyber Attacks Timeline covering the cyber events occurred in the first half of the current month.

Three events in particular have marked this month: The German Trojan R2-D2 (that is raising many questions and concerns inside the infosec community), the keylogger hitting U.S. Drones and a new cyber attack to Sony involving this time “only” 93,000 accounts (oops! They did it again).

Except for a couple of isolated occurrences (in Austria and UK), the Cyber Attacks by Anonymous and Antisec had a break, maybe because hacktivism efforts are being focused on the #OccupyWallStreet operation that is rapidly spreading all over the World (I wonder why in here in Rome yesterday it has not been possible to have peaceful protests as happened in all the other Capitals). Besides, albeit not directly related with Anonymous, several Syrian log files were leaked showing the control of the Government on the Internet.

Other events of the month: a couple of fashion related websites were hacked, the Cyber-Guerrilla between India and Pakistan was particularly active with the cyber armies of the two nations facing themselves in the cyber space with continual mutual defacements, @SwichSmoke was also particularly active against Venezuela Government Web Sites. Other “minor” leaks were performed by @FailRoot and @ThEhAcKeR12 but one of the victims of the latter was Camber Corporation, an U.S. Contractor.

Anyway, Camber Corporation was not the only targeted Contractor, also Raytheon Corporation (a survivor of the RSA Breach) was targeted with a cloud based spear-phishing campaign, again the attack was thwarted but, in my opinion, has deserved a mention as well. Chronicles also reports of a claimed hack to Infragard (again).

Moreover the aftermaths of the RSA breach are not completely over: this month the security firm’s CEO claimed that a couple of different Cyber Crews, under the flag of an enemy nation (and the suspects were immediately directed to China), are behind the Cyber Attack in March and acted to perform it.

But a very special mention for this month (and the consequent lowly desiderable prize), is undoubtedly deserved by Mr. Oliver Letwin, Her Majesty’s Cabinet Minister, who was caught by The Daily Mirror in the habit of dumping private correspondence and sensitive documents detailing Al-Qaeda activities and secret service operations into park bins in St James’s Park, Westminster, close to Downing Street. Security, logical and physical, may have many unpredictable implications…

From a technical point of view SQLi and defacements were the most used lethal weapons for this month, even if a massive ASP.NET based attack, targeting 300,000 web sites, is also worth mentioning.

Once again a US Government contractor is target of cyber crime. This time is the turn of Camber Corporation, targeted by a small hack by @ThEhAcKeR12, which releases 3 admin accounts with encrypted passwords. and admin full name.

Thailand’s Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, had her Twitter account hacked flooding her followers with a stream of messages criticising her leadership with statements like this: The final post read: “If she can’t even protect her own Twitter account, how can she protect the country?“

WKO confirms that its webserver was infiltrated by unidentified cyber criminals. More than 6,000 data sets of customers of the chamber were published on the internet. Although Anonymous Austria leaked the data, they stressed they had not carried out the attack on WKO themselves, but had been provided with the records by someone else, adding that the security leak was exposed by using online search engine Google. Estimated cost of the Breach is around $1,284,000.

Optik Fiber releases several gmail accounts claimed to have been hacked via a known security flaw in gmail. It is not sure if this is real or not but it is meaningful as well of the global level of (in)security, real or psychological.

The University of Georgia discovers a data file on a publicly available Web server that contained sensitive personnel information on 18,931 members of the faculty and staff employed at the institution in 2002. The file included the social security number, name, date of birth, date of employment, sex, race, home phone number and home address of individuals employed at UGA in 2002. Estimatec Cost of the Breach is around $4,051,234.

Wired reports that a computer virus has infected Predator drones and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ keystroke during their fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones. The virus was detected nearly two weeks ago at the Ground Control System (GCS) at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and has not prevented drones from flying their missions, showing an unexpected strength so that multiple efforts were necessary to remove it from Creech’s computers.

A very strange (un)lawful Cyber Attack, against German Citizens. Chaos Computer Club discloses a “state malware”: a backdoor Trojan horse capable of spying on online activity and recording Skype internet calls. They declare the malware is used by the German police force. The malware was allegedly installed onto the computer as it passed through customs control at Munich Airport.

Turkish Energy Team performs (and keeps on to perform) a massive defacement against several governments websites (in certain cases some sub domains). The list (in continuous growth) is published on Zone-H.

Another Web site hosting company defaced: this time it is the turn of justonehost.com that is hacked by @FailRoot, that also dumps its Database online. The leak contains all users informations, emails, paypals and much more is 11.86mb and has been uploaded to megaupload.

RSA reveals that it believes two groups, working on behalf of a single nation state, hacked into its servers during the infamous Breach of March and stole information related to the company’s SecurID two-factor authentication products used to attack some defense contractors. Although people are likely to assume that China might have been involved in the attack, they did not reveal the name of the nation involved.

Back tho the future! Sony under cyber attack… Again! The Company reports of unauthorized attempts to verify valid user accounts on Playstation Network, Sony Entertainment Network and Sony Online Entertainment. A total of 93,000 accounts have been affected (PSN/SEN: approximately 60,000 accounts; SOE: approximately 33,000). In these cases the attempts succeeded in verifying valid sign-in IDs and passwords, so the accounts were temporalily locked.

Unknown Hackers hack the European property Dealers website blueHOMES.com . About 500,000 Users data claim to be hacked including database with customer passwords in plaintext, full addresses, skype account, and mailboxes of bluehomes. Specified data leaked on pastebin with sample data of some users.

Another website hit by Havij. This time is the turn of Find2Trade, an internet portal whose goal is to help small and medium enterprises to reach much higher profits while reducing costs. UserID, email and passwords, which are encrypted, were leaked.

The U.S. Defense Contractor reveals that it was the victim of a cloud-based attack for the first time, with the incident occurring one week before. Nothing new but the fact that this was the first cloud based attack. The firm usually blocks 1.2 billion attacks a day in addition to four million spam emails each day.

Another Linux Project hacked! Jeremy White, Codeweavers Founder announces that access to the WineHQ database has been compromised. It looks like attackers have used phpMyAdmin to access the WineHQ project’s database and harvest users’ appdb and bugzilla access credentials.

Google reveals another mass infection which affected hundreds of thousands of sites that relied on ASP or ASP.NET: A malicious script got injected into several locations targeting English, German, French and other language speakers surfers.

The biotechnology company suffered a data breach on August, 17 which may have resulted in the theft of information belonging to 3,500 of the million patients who utilize the company’s support programs. Estimated Cost of The Breach is around $750,000

Ok a Chili Breach is not a big deal, except the fact that the computer server Hackers broke into, is placed at Yokosuka Naval Base. According to Navy officials, hackers stole credit card information and run up erroneous charges.

This is not a direct cyber attack but a consequence of the hacks to Linux projects (Kernel.org and Linux). ThreatPost reveals that Fedora Project contacted users to change their password and SSH public key before November 30 to avoid having their accounts marked as inactive.

Another dump of sites from @SwichSmoke coming from the state “Barinas” and the government for that state. The release note, in Spanish states that the original password is 123456, fairly lame for a government website.

It seems that Infragrad has been hacked again and had a dump of accounts leaked and decrypted even if there is no source or reason or even proof that this is 100% real in anyway. Anyway it still shows that Infragard is still in the eyes of some people. The alleged leak contains emails, usernames, encrypted passwords and the decryption of the password as well.

The Netaji Subhash Engineering College NSEC is hacked and has a fair amount of member accounts dumped on pastebin. This comes from an unknown source and unknown reasons. The leak contains full user information, emails and passwords in clear text.

Special mention this month for Her Mayesty’s Cabinet Minister Oliver Letwin, who has got himself into hot water, after The Daily Mirrorreported him in the habit of dumping private correspondence and sensitive documents detailing Al-Qaeda activities and secret service operations into park bins in St James’s Park, Westminster, close to Downing Street. The documents contained the personal details of the minister’s constituents, including names, phone numbers, email contacts and postal addresses.

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About This Blog

In this blog I express my personal opinion, which does not necessarily reflects the opinion of my organization, about events and news or interest, concerning information security, winking to mobile world and, why not, to some curious personal event.

Every information is reported with its source.

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